Mary Bei Prince ’20 • Hopper

Eduard Hopper (1882-1967) was an American painter, printmaker, and illustrator renown for forlorn scenes of urban and rural existence that reflected his perspective of modern American life. Esteemed for his oil paintings, Hopper imbued city scenes or figures in interiors with feelings of loneliness through his careful execution and sparseness. In The Camel’s Hump (1931), Hopper manipulates composition and color to summon a sense of solitude.

Comprised of a hillside and a cloud-streaked sky, the landscape expresses isolation through its composition and linear movement. Dunes occupy the lower two-thirds of the piece. A foreshortened hill extends into the foreground: its outline descends from the center of the piece’s left perimeter, reaching a point towards the last horizontal fourth, before gently curving upwards–resembling an elongated cosine wave. Subsequently, a saddle-shaped bluff commands the midground, flanked by a rotund hill on the left and an ascending ridge on the right. Thin, wispy cirrus clouds mimic the cosine diagonal, expanding from the top-left towards the peaks at the right perimeter. Hopper’s composition utilizes diagonals to create a movement throughout the piece, emphasizing separation. The two lines created by the foremost hill and the tuft of clouds run parallel, framing the rugged, midline edge. This mirrored relationship highlights the irregularity of the saddle-shaped hill through disassociation, while the jagged edge serves as a partition. Both relationships underscore a feeling of isolation.

Hopper also conveys sentiments of loneliness through a limited color palette. Illustrating a predominantly green scene, he manipulates blue to demarcate shadow as well as the sky. Representing the absence of light, blue tones establish a slight atmospheric perspective as the temperature of the piece becomes cooler as the eye recedes into the painting. The blue in the foreground gives form to the bushes and grasses, creating a sense of depth. Scattered around the nooks in the midground, different blues dim the greenery to delineate a coldness provided by the lack of sunlight. Within the sky, a wash of blue underlies layers of pink and white cirrus clouds. Representing a lower value, thus lacking brightness, Hopper’s blue tones embody a cold, lonesome quality. Likewise, the use of yellow suggests seclusion. Yellow patches on the perch of the saddle-shaped hill illustrate bare sand and the dearth of foliage. Highlighting the sunlight striking the slope in the foreground, the yellow subdues the green, stressing the line between this ridge and the shadowed hills in the background. Tints of yellow accentuate contrast and echo the disjointed, linear movement. This movement is reinforced by red tones throughout the work. The insertion of pinks into the foreground highlights a path while the combination of complementary colors demonstrates shadows in the midground. Hopper’s manipulation of the color green through its mingling with blue, yellow, and red demonstrate contrast, separation, and solitude.

Through linear gestures and poignant color Hopper evokes feelings of loneliness that are indicative of his body of work. Hopper creates compositions that converge line and color to communicate depth, articulate volume, and amplify space. In doing so, he invites the viewer into the scene and ultimately isolates them within the space.